This chapter analyzes the implementation of Invented Language Projects in different institutional and pedagogical contexts, focusing on introductory level linguistics. The data the chapter draws on come from students at three public universities, in a variety of class sizes, across undergraduate cohorts, and using a variety of integrations of language invention in course materials, over the last five years. The chapter identifies patterns of effectiveness in the use of language invention in the classroom by analyzing data collected inside and outside of these courses, assessing students’ mastery of core concepts in linguistics, their beliefs and attitudes about language, and their perception of the utility of language invention for their own learning. Though there is variation in the effectiveness of these strategies as they are instantiated in different contexts, the chapter shows that language invention is a promising way to engage with and effectively teach introductory students about the workings of natural human language.

is one of two main dialect families of Welsh (cym, ISO 693-3) spoken in Wales, the other being Southern Welsh. The Welsh counties of Anglesey, Gwynedd, Conwy, Denbighshire, Flintshire, and Wrexham in the United Kingdom are considered to comprise the unofficial region of North Wales shown in Figure 1 (as designated by StatsWales 2018). Within this area there are further dialectal differences that are beyond the scope of this analysis, which considers the general features of Northern Welsh as a whole. However, see Thomas & Thomas (1989) for an overview of differences between eastern and western varieties of Northern Welsh.Welsh is a Brittonic Celtic language, more closely related to Cornish and Breton than to Celtic languages in the Goidelic branch: Manx, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic (Ball & Fife 1993). Like all Celtic languages, Welsh has verb-initial word order and a system of initial consonant mutation. Initial consonant mutation is the remnant of historic sandhi processes which conditioned predictable phonological alternations. Today, the phonological triggers for these alternations are opaque or absent, and mutation is best described as a morphophonological process that is found in a small set of lexical items and syntactic patterns (see section 'Mutation' below for further detail).Phonetic description of Welsh has a long history, notably Sweet (1882) and S. Jones (1926). More recent work includes a description of the vocalic system (G. E. Jones 1971(G. E. Jones , 1972, a description of Welsh stress (B. Williams 1999), a collected volume reporting a

Abstract. Listeners integrate a wide variety of cues when categorizing speech sounds, including lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information. We investigate the influence of Initial Consonant Mutation, a morphosyntacticallytriggered alternation in the modern Celtic languages, on the categorical perception of stop voicing in Welsh. Once sandhi processes, Celtic mutations are now lexically and morphosyntactically triggered; in particular, Welsh Soft Mutation causes wordinitial voiceless stops to become voiced when they are preceded by a triggering word or construction. This paper reports the results of a two-alternative forced choice task that tests the hypothesis that Welsh listeners integrate their knowledge of mutationtriggering environments during speech perception, accepting more ambiguous segments as voiced when preceded by a Soft-Mutation-triggering word relative to a non-triggering word. While the results of the experiment demonstrate categorical perception of stop voicing, no robust effect of mutation environment was found. Several hypotheses as to why the predicted result was not found are considered.

No abstract

In this paper we investigate category-specific effects through the lens of Welsh mutation. Smith (2011) and Moreton et al. (2017) show that English distinguishes nouns and proper nouns in an experimental blending task. Here we show that Welsh distinguishes nouns, verbs, personal names, and place names in the mutation system. We demonstrate these effects experimentally in a translation task designed to elicit mutation intuitions and in several corpus studies. In addition, we show that these effects correlate with lexical frequency. Deeper statistical analysis and a review of the English data suggests that frequency is a more explanatory factor than part of speech in both languages. We therefore argue that these category-specific effects can be reduced to lexical frequency effects.